PlayStation has confirmed that, starting in 2028, it will no longer release physical games. Xbox has been quietly pulling back on physical releases, too. Nintendo, however, as always, seems intent on doing its own thing, and that thing almost certainly won't involve leaving physical games behind for a while.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest Nintendo has no plans to leave physical games behind despite what's going on around it. For starters, its latest console is only a year old. That console has a slot for physical games. It's seemingly increasingly likely that Project Helix and the PS6 will not.

Almost Half Of Nintendo's Game Sales Are Still Physical

More importantly, there are still a lot of people buying physical Nintendo games, as demonstrated by the slide below pulled from Nintendo's most recent financial report (thanks, Stealth40k). 54.6 percent of Nintendo games sold during FY2026 were digital. While that's more than half, it's a lot closer to an even 50/50 split than it is on PlayStation and Xbox.

Nintendo

The most recent PlayStation numbers indicate that close to 80 percent of its game sales are digital.

With such a significant chunk of its player base still choosing physical games over digital ones, that's a lot of people Nintendo is going to potentially upset, possibly even drive away, if it were to make a similar announcement to the one PlayStation made on Wednesday. All the backlash you've seen online in the last 24 hours? Replace PlayStation with Nintendo and, conservative estimate, the number of upset gamers doubles.

Based on manufacturing costs alone, you'd think Nintendo would have been the first to leave physical games behind. According to FRVR (via Nintendo Everything), it costs roughly $6.50 to manufacture a physical PS5 game. A Switch game costs around twice that, anywhere between $12 and $15, with physical Switch 2 games reportedly costing Nintendo even more.

Nintendo Is Taking A Different Approach To Physical Gaming's Future

Nintendo has already demonstrated how it plans to remedy that, though, and it isn't by leaving physical releases behind. Instead, it has upped the cost of physical versions of its first-party games. Most now cost $10 more than their digital MSRP. Game-key cards have also been introduced during the Switch 2 era. A controversial move that now seems like the lesser of two evils as users on rival platforms reluctantly brace themselves for a future filled with codes in boxes.

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Game key-cards are by no means perfect. They are effectively keys, hence the name, that trigger a download when inserted into a Switch 2. However, that seems far preferable to buying an empty box with nothing but a slip of paper inside. A disc that triggers a download instead of the all-digital future PlayStation will usher in 18 months from now would have caused uproar, sure, but not on the same level as we're experiencing right now.

Its methods might have been unpopular when first introduced, but once again, Nintendo is coming out of all this smelling of roses compared to PlayStation and Xbox. That's partly because it still has a sizable audience of physical game customers to cater to, but it's largely because it set itself apart from its rivals 20 years ago and has been successfully doing its own thing rather than trying to do a better version of what someone else is doing ever since. The way it has approached the physical/digital split is the latest example of that.

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Nintendo Switch 2

Brand Nintendo Original Release Date June 5, 2025 Original MSRP (USD) $449.99 Operating System Proprietary Resolution 1080p (handheld) / 4K (docked) HDR Support Yes See at Official Site Expand Collapse